by Edward Hogan
“Fine,” I said. “I’m fine.”
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing,” I said.
I covered the postcard, although he’d only have seen a jumble of shapes anyway. Still, he looked at me suspiciously. In fact, he almost looked afraid. I wondered about what I was becoming.
“Right. OK, then,” he said, walking off to the bathroom.
In my bedroom, I looked at what I’d drawn.
A streetlight in an alleyway.
A woman lying on the ground, blood across her face.
There was a rolled-up bundle by her legs and the contents of a Sainsbury’s shopping bag scattered around her body.
Four youths were leaving the scene.
I needed Peter. I had no idea how to read the message, no idea where the death would take place, and no idea how to stop it from happening. I needed him because — although I never would have admitted it — I was frightened. And I needed him because he quickened my pulse and made me feel alive.
Then I looked closer at the woman in the picture. Beneath the wounds, I recognized her and my heart jumped.
It was Helen from the Coffee Shack.
I had my pride. So it wasn’t like I went banging on his door.
But I spent most of the next morning sitting on one of the metal chairs outside the Coffee Shack, watching Helen serve the customers, and storm clouds rolling in over the sea.
Peter came and found me. He stood at my table. “Can I sit down?”
“Not if you’re going to bang on about how irresponsible I am.”
“I won’t. But I do need to say something. You shouldn’t have said you’d rather be dead. You’re a good person, and you’ve got a lot to live for.”
“Well,” I said. “I suppose you can sit down, then.”
He did. “I’m sorry about how I reacted,” he said.
“It’s OK. But don’t you see what it could mean, if we can save people? For you? For both of us?”
I knew he was thinking of his son. I could see that it caused him pain. He shook his head and lit a cigarette. “I suppose I’ve accepted the situation for so long that it seemed easier to go on accepting it. There’s nothing more painful than . . .”
“Hope?” I said.
“Yes,” he said.
I put my hand on his arm.
“How did you find the clues, again?” he said.
“I scanned the painting onto a computer and enlarged it. The image is so small, but I could zoom in and move around, looking for what might have happened. Your paintings have such detail, so that helped.”
“I’ve been doing it for a long time.”
“Pete, this could set you free from all the pain you have to witness. And it could mean you’re able to see your family again. You could meet your boy. Even if you paint him, God forbid, you’ll be able to work out how to stop it from happening.”
“That’s a huge risk,” he said.
He was imagining it — imagining himself painting the death of his son, the horror of waking up to it. He was imagining himself showing the painting to the boy, and the panic of trying to work out what was going to happen.
“It would be worth it though, wouldn’t it?” I said.
“For me perhaps.”
“For the bloody recipients!” I said.
“Well, yes,” he said. “They obviously stand to benefit.”
“And for your boy, too. He’d have a dad. Better than that,” I said. “He’d have you.”
“Maybe I could just see him a couple of times,” Peter said. “Just to meet him.”
“Yes! See how it goes.”
He took a deep breath. “I think the computer zoom might be better than my loupe,” he said. “Will you show me how to scan the pictures and search them?”
“Of course. Don’t you have a scanner?” I said.
“No.”
“We can go to the library.”
He stood up.
“Peter,” I said, taking the postcard of Helen from my rucksack. “We can start with this.”
He turned his head and squinted at the pencil sketch. “Hey, isn’t that . . . ?” He turned to look at the serving counter of the Coffee Shack.
“Yes,” I said.
“When did you draw it?”
“Last night.”
“Jesus,” he said. “Let’s get going.”
We rushed off to the library. A car slowed down on the main road, and I immediately winced, as if an accident would follow. The messenger instinct. But nobody died this time, and the man in the car was Uncle Robert. I made eye contact briefly, but Robert was more concerned with the tall man at my side.
“We’ll have to get one of those computers in the corner of the room,” I said. Of course, being the area of a public library used mainly by people who didn’t have home Internet access, it was full of folk who looked weirder than us, doing things that were only slightly less dodgy.
We waited for a bloke with half a skinhead to stop scanning the palms of his hands, and then we moved in and got to work. I showed Peter how to upload the image of the postcard, and we waited some more. I flinched when it opened. I didn’t know Helen beyond buying a cup of tea from her, but it was still hard to see her like that, her face bloodied.
Peter was calm. He’d seen this sort of thing so many times before. “Our job is to work out her final movements,” he said. “How do I zoom in?”
I showed him.
He swept across the picture, zeroing in on certain details: the streetlight, the trainers of one of the youths leaving the scene, Helen’s face, the Sainsbury’s carrier bags. He muttered to himself. Eventually, he focused on the rolled-up bundle by her knee.
“What’s that?” I said.
“Looks like a yoga mat,” said Peter.
“So, that’s a clue! She goes to yoga.”
“This is Helmstown,” Peter said. “There are approximately ten million yoga classes.”
“So how do we find out which one she goes to?” I said.
“We use an old-fashioned research method,” Peter said.
“What’s that?”
“We talk to her. You’re going to ask her where she does her class.”
“Why me?”
“You have a rapport with her,” Peter said. It was true. And it was what made this message so scary.
We stared at the screen a little longer. “You need to speak to her as soon as possible and get as much information as you can. A street name at least,” he said.
I felt suddenly nervous about the prospect of speaking to Helen.
“Could we not just tell her what’s going to happen?” I said.
“What, you mean go up to her and say, ‘Excuse me, I wouldn’t go to yoga tomorrow night, because you’re going to die on the way back’?”
“She wouldn’t believe us,” I said.
“She’d have us locked up,” Peter said. “I should know. If we’re going to do this sort of thing, we need to stay under the radar.”
I nodded. “OK. I’ll speak to her. I’ll do it when I deliver the message.”
“Today,” he said.
“She’ll have finished her shift. I’ll do it tomorrow.” I paused. “Peter.”
“Yes.”
“I can’t look at this anymore. I feel sick,” I said.
“OK,” he said, taking the postcard out of the scanner and clicking the X to close the window. “Let’s call it a day. I’ll go back to the Coffee Shack and see what I can find out about her from the other staff. You need some rest.”
We left the library and emerged into a gray, humid headache of an afternoon. “I have to go back to my auntie’s,” I said.
“Yes,” Peter said. He looked at me.
“Y’all right, mate?” I said.
He put his arms around me, and I let myself enjoy the nearness of him. I put my hand on his chest, and he didn’t move it away. I felt this weight, this urge, pulling me toward him. I couldn’t get near enough. “Thank you, Frances,” he said. “I�
�m not sure I’m comfortable about messing with fate yet. We’ll have to keep an eye on the consequences. . . .”
I sighed.
“But thank you for trying,” Peter said.
“That’s OK,” I said. “You owe me, though.”
He said something else as he turned to go. It sounded like “You’re amazing,” but I couldn’t be sure. Since Johnny had gone, I hadn’t heard those sort of words much.
I walked around the block a couple of times. I called Mum, I called Johnny, but I couldn’t get an answer. I felt like I had a lot of energy, a lot of power, and it had to go somewhere. So I made sure Peter had left the area, and then I went back into the library, to the local studies section. I took a piece of scrap paper, sat down at a computer with a couple of telephone directories, and began to search for Peter’s son.
The next day, I went to the beach as early as I could. The life of Helen, a coffee waitress in her twenties, was in our hands. We had until about 9:15 p.m. that night to save her. I walked toward the Coffee Shack and stood back for a moment. They had a Saint George flag on the shack, because of the football tournament, but without much wind, the cross on the flag had drooped and looked more like an X. Helen’s red hair was tied back, and steam from the kettle rose around her face. I got in line. Greg, the man with the whippet, was there again. The guy drank so much coffee, it was a wonder his brain didn’t explode.
“You know, I have a dog,” Helen said as she got his drink.
“Do you? Great! I mean, what kind?”
“A Weimaraner.”
“Oh, they’re nice.”
“Same color as Hercules, just about.”
“Yes?”
“Sort of milky coffee.”
“No. Black, please. One sugar.”
Helen laughed. I could see that Greg was working hard to build up some courage. “Actually,” he said, “Hercules and I often walk the route beneath the cliffs. It’s really beautiful, and he loves it. There’s a nice café at the end. . . .”
“Really?” said Helen, looking hopeful as she handed him his cup.
“Yes,” he said. He paused and seemed to lose his confidence. “Anyway, thanks for the coffee. Bye.”
He turned and walked away, his eyes shut tight and a grimace on his face. Even Hercules looked forlorn.
Helen was clearly disappointed. But she didn’t know what was coming next, did she? I felt sick, but I tried not to show it. “Hello. Two teas, please,” I said.
“That’s two pounds twenty,” she said.
I put the postcard in front of her on the counter and watched her eyes flicker over it. “That’s nice. Is it Picasso?”
“Oh, sorry,” I said. I replaced the postcard with a five-pound note.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Hey, do you do yoga?” I said.
“Yes, how did you know? Is it because I’m so flexible and relaxed?” she said, laughing.
“I saw you with your mat the other day,” I said. “Anyway, I’ve been thinking of going to classes.”
“Really? Well, I go to the Ashtanga place on Ferris Avenue. The teacher is really good, and she doesn’t make you do too much of the embarrassing chanting.”
“What time do you go?”
“I do the eight-till-nine-o’clock class. I’m going tonight actually.”
“Great,” I said. “I might see you there.”
I took the drinks and a long look at Helen, then made my way back to the beach hut.
Peter was ready with a map of Helmstown, his laptop, and a pile of notes. I saw that he’d bought a scanner, too.
“OK. So, tonight she goes to yoga. Then she shops at Sainsbury’s, and then she goes home to Butler Street,” Peter said.
The previous day, Peter had struck up a conversation with the manager of the Coffee Shack. He’d pretended to know Helen and found out her surname, which was Rossdale. From that information, he’d found out where she lived.
We looked at the map, trying to figure out which alley I had drawn in the message.
“There’s a Sainsbury’s near her house,” I said, pointing to the map.
“Yes, but if she goes to yoga here, on Ferris Avenue, then she’d go to the Sainsbury’s here, because it’s right next door.”
I followed her probable route home with my finger and found a thin street. “Vine Alley,” I said. “She’d go down Vine Alley.”
“I know where that is,” he said.
“But it’s safer to stall her outside the yoga class, isn’t it?” I said.
“Not necessarily. We don’t know how long those kids will hang around. Let’s meet here, and then walk to the alley together. Her class finishes at nine, so let’s meet at eight thirty, just to be safe.”
The determined expression he’d had for the last half hour suddenly slipped into one of doubt as he looked at the screen.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
“They’ll probably just beat up someone else,” Peter said.
“We can only do what we can,” I said. “We’ve got the opportunity to save someone, and we’ve got to take it.”
“We don’t really know anything about this woman,” Peter said. “Who’s to say she’s a good person? She could be a mass murderer, for all we know.”
“I doubt many mass murderers do yoga,” I said.
“I’m just saying. There are always consequences.”
“I know that. The difference between you and me is that you always think the consequences are going to be terrible.”
“So would you if you’d been a messenger for as long as I have. It’s a result of personal experience.”
“Well, let’s start making some good experiences, shall we?”
He stared at the wall of his hut, mulling it all over. “OK,” he said eventually. “I’ll see you tonight.”
Auntie Lizzie tried to smile when I got home, but I could tell something was on her mind. She was tense. Decent people like her are rubbish at hiding how they feel. “Oh, hi, Fran! You look nice. Where’ve you been?”
“Just for a walk,” I said.
“Great. That’s great. Listen,” she said, and she lowered her voice. “Robert’s doing his three-course Italian dinner thing tonight. He wanted us all to have a meal together.”
“I’d love to, Auntie Lizzie, but —”
“It would mean a lot to him. And to me, actually. We feel like we’ve hardly seen you. Don’t you think it would be nice? The four of us?”
I didn’t want to raise suspicion, and I certainly didn’t want to get into a fight. Not now. I nodded. “Sure. Sounds great.”
I was already calculating how early I could get out of the house.
I spent the afternoon in my room, thinking about Helen Rossdale. We didn’t sit down to dinner until eight p.m., and I started to panic. I checked my phone every five minutes, and I ate the mozzarella salad and the ravioli in about three bites.
“Goodness,” said Auntie Lizzie. “You’re eating rather fast, Frances.”
“Oh, it’s just, er — it’s so tasty, that’s all,” I said, looking at Uncle Robert. “I can’t stop myself.”
“You’d enjoy it even more if you actually chewed, ha-ha,” said Uncle Robert. Nobody else laughed. I certainly didn’t. Max stared at his food. I had ruined the atmosphere, but I couldn’t help it. The clock was ticking.
My phone went. A message from Peter: Leaving now. I began to type an answer, but Auntie Lizzie frowned and I put the phone in my pocket. I wondered if Peter would wait for me or go straight to Vine Alley to intercept Helen. I felt like I had to be there or it would all fall apart. I imagined the four youths, filling the width of the alley.
Uncle Robert went to the kitchen and came back with some ice cream. “Neapolitan,” Max said. “Nice.”
“It is not Neapolitan,” Uncle Robert said. He pointed at the ice cream, which was split into three sections: red, white, and green. “It’s spumoni, authentic Sicilian ice cream. The green is pistachio. The colors of the Italia
n flag, see?”
I had to get out of the house. “Listen,” I said, standing up. “This was great. Really. But I’ve got to go. I’ll see you all later.”
“Frances,” said Auntie Lizzie apologetically, “do you mind telling us where you’re going, love?”
“Just out. Seafront, probably.”
She started to speak again but stopped. Uncle Robert put his hand on hers and took over. “We wondered if you were going to meet the, er . . . the man I saw you with the other day.”
I sighed. “I’m not being funny, Uncle Robert, but that’s my business.”
“That’s true to a certain extent,” he said, nodding patiently. “But obviously while you’re staying with us . . .”
“We don’t want to be overbearing, Frances,” said Auntie Lizzie.
“Don’t be, then,” I said. “Look, I’ve got to go. Can we talk about this later?”
They looked at each other. Auntie Lizzie rubbed her eyes under her glasses. “There’s a lot going on in your life at the moment,” she said. “Everything back home . . . We just . . . We care about you — that’s all.”
I nodded. “I know,” I said. And I was gone.
I was later than planned, but I still had time. I knew Vine Alley was several blocks back from the beach, but the streets around there seemed to wind in tight circles. All the houses looked the same. White and regular, like teeth. I stood outside a pub, the Anchor, which was heaving with men, all facing the TV screens. I checked the map on my phone. The GPS wasn’t working. I was still pretty confident that I could find the place, though.
I kept walking, quickening my pace. I took one turn, then another. The name of the streets looked familiar, but I couldn’t focus. My brain was too full. I tried to call Peter, but he didn’t pick up. I closed my eyes and visualized the map we had looked at earlier, but the streets had morphed into one another and reversed themselves. “Think, dammit!” I said out loud. Time was slipping away. I ran to the end of the road I was on, took a left, and felt sure I was now on the right track. Then I saw the Anchor again, and my blood turned cold. I ran back the way I’d come.
As I was running, a huge noise rose up over Helmstown, and it took me a moment to realize that people were watching the football match. It sounded like a scream of terror. A young boy in a red T-shirt emerged from a front door to my right and punched the air. “Yes! Come on, England!” he said.
